


Ner Skira

by kate_fire



Series: Clone Wars Dæmon ficlets [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Actually he's four, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Baby Boba Fett, Daemon Feels, Gen, Hanging clones out to dry, It's a good age, Jango Fett is not a good person, Legends!Jango Fett, POV Jango Fett, Parent Jango Fett
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:27:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26842141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kate_fire/pseuds/kate_fire
Summary: The dæmons of clones never settle. But they aren't the only ones created on Kaminoa.
Series: Clone Wars Dæmon ficlets [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1801033
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	Ner Skira

**Author's Note:**

> sort-of Legends!Jango Fett, since Disney dumped everything interesting. FYI, Jango is a mediocre father by all except Mandalorian values.  
> Translations from Mando'a at the end.

Four, Jango thought, as a little foot hit him in the face. Four is a good age. 

Boba finished climbing behind him and settled on his shoulders. Small hands, still soft, curled tightly into Jango’s hair as he peered over his father’s head. Skira mimicked her human by settling as a baby jackal on top of Kyramla, using tiny teeth to grasp onto the larger jackal’s scruff. “Cleaning the guns?” he asked.

“Mm-hm.”

“That’s a wee-star!” Boba crowed, and Jango tilted his head a little so his son could catch it when the corner of his mouth curled up with pride. 

“Westar-34,” he agreed, offering up the empty handle. “Just invented. See the holes?” 

Boba leant forward, then stood up on his father’s shoulders to lean even farther to get a better view. “Uh-huh! They’re in the holding part!”

“The handle. It makes them lighter.” Jango spun the blaster in his grip. “Lighter is faster.”

“Lighter is faster,” Boba echoed, then bounced on his feet. It unbalanced him enough that Jango had to toss his blasters on the table in order to catch his son with both hands. In a deft move that spoke to his son’s burgeoning agility, Boba grasped his hands and used them as a swing, chortling the entire way. 

“Like me!” he laughed. “I’m faster than you!” And he took off down the halls in their quarters, Skira shifting to a bird form to keep up. 

Boba was getting faster, Jango mused as he followed at a fast walk. Kyramla loped in front of him, snapping at Skira playfully. It wouldn’t be long before he could take him out on jobs at eight, but for now? Four was a good age. 

Later, as the nanny-droid fed Boba his dinner and Jango headed towards the commissary, he considered staying around the base a little more. The last year or so had been such a headache—every time he’d headed out for a job Boba would have a tantrum, and it seemed that he rarely got back for longer than a day before another meltdown occurred. It made Jango want to be away on business more often than not, and he’d taken advantage of the nanny-droids more than he probably should have. Maybe now he’d only take one job every two or three months. 

His eyes narrowed as he entered the commissary, the huge echoing room full of cadets quietly eating. Very little conversation was going on, even between the constantly-shifting dæmons and their humans. The oldest cadets were closest to the trainers, and Jango passed them with a nod as he and Kyramla headed for the Mandalorian Cuy’val Dar. 

The cadets bobbed their heads in response, creating a little wave of dark heads that was both unnerving and moved something deep in Jango. The heads stayed down, whispering to each other. It was a little amusing to see the few dæmons shift into jackal form temporarily, echoing Karamla.

He knew they revered him, and he wished they didn’t. He’d done this, sent thousands, perhaps million versions of himself into slavery for the Jedi. No matter what that man “Tyrannus” called himself, he could smell a Jedi ten klicks away. An army for the Republic? Right. Then why was a Jedi in charge of ordering it? Clearly they had gotten bored with playing the Republic from the shadows and were ready to take over the fight at the edges of the galaxy. They could enslave everyone who disagreed with them, kidnap all the babies they wanted. But the thought of children, just like  _ Boba _ , having no choice to serve  _ Jedi _ left a small cold stone in his gut. The money had been good, though. Too good to resist. And he told himself that it would prove to the galaxy that the Jedi were what Jango always knew them to be: hypocritical, slavery-supporting baby-snatchers.

The hand-picked trainers, most of them Mandalorians he’d known or worked with, sat at the far end of the commissary. This was his attempt at revenge—teaching his clones the Mandalorian code, that there was honor in fighting, that slavery was evil, so that one day they would rise up and strike down their Jedi enslavers. 

He sat down next to the sergeant at the end. “Skirata.”

“Fett,” Kal replied with a nod, handing over a data pad. On the screen were some of the stats on the latest recruits. “This weeks’ info.”

Jango glanced at it, but then ignored it. “You requested a meeting?”

Skirata’s dæmon, a six-eyed Kurati tree lizard crawled out of his jacket collar. Jango tried not to sneer as the dæmon cleaned its eye with its tongue. Everyone knew the Kurati tree lizards were generally harmless. Not at all a demon for a warrior. Skirata shifted as if he could sense Jango’s thoughts, but then his eyes slid to the other trainers. “Not here.”

They followed Skirata down the hall to a separate room, something that was probably a conference room or a very small classroom. Jango filed Skirata’s familiarity of the base away carefully—it was only reasonable that the trainers who lived here full-time were more familiar with the base, but it galled him that someone else was more familiar in his home than he was.

“It’s about the boys,” Skirata said.

Jango crossed his arms over his chest. Kyramla sat on her haunches and curled her tail around her feet.

“They’d be ready for their  _ verd’goten _ in the next year or so.” He looked uncomfortable at the thought. Jango had never even considered taking all the clones through the traditional warrior’s trials; when a being aged twice as fast as they should, who’s to know when adulthood was really upon them? It didn’t really matter when they were being trained as fast as they could be anyways.

Skirata tightened his jaw. “You know as well as I that there’s always a few  _ ade _ that have settled their dæmons before the trials. But none of the lads have settled. At all. Any of them.”

“Out of the first thousand?”

“Out of the first  _ ten _ thousand.” Skirata let that fall between them. There was a moment of silence while both the men thought. 

Jango considered that at least the cadets  _ had _ dæmons. The first batch had been created without them—how the Kaminoans had managed he didn’t know, but he knew their reasoning, same as any other non-human species that didn’t have dæmons. How safe was it for a soldier to have half their soul outside their body? But as he had stared at their half-empty cradles his skin crawled, and Kyramla had whimpered steadily. As the Kaminoans had looked to him for approval, he’d managed to bite out,  _ “If you do this, I will not train them, contract or no. _ ” He’d known that he was sentencing the babes to death and dissection, but at least he didn’t have to see empty-souled children wearing his face for ten years.

Finally he shrugged. “They’ll settle eventually.”

“And if they don’t?” Skirata’s voice held the concern of a worried parent, not a teacher. Jango frowned. 

“Then they don’t. Is that all?”

Skirata paused for a second, then inhaled. “About your son, Jango.”

“What. About. My. Son.” Jango’s voice was an electrowhip.

“It’s not too late to change his dul’runi’s name—” Skirata started.

“This is not up for discussion.”

“It’s not the Mandalorian Way—” Skirata was a brave man, he kept going. “It’s anathema, a curse on your clan! Naming your child’s dæmon—”

A knife suddenly sprouted above Skirata’s shoulder, pinning his coat to the wall and coming very, very close to his lizard dæmon on his collar. 

Jango leant forward to pull it out, and Skirata’s tree lizard skittered back into his jacket. “If I hear one word about my son or his dæmon pass your lips to him or to anyone else I will skin your lizard and make a bandoleer for Kyramla.”

He put the knife in his sleeve holster and turned for the door. “You’d understand if you had any sons,” he said. “This is not up for discussion. Ever again.”

His hand worked in a fist as he paced the hallways away from the conference room. Beside him, Kyramla’s ears were pinned back. That smug judgmental bastard, who did he think he was? But he spoke for the majority of the Mandalorian trainers. They probably all were judging him. Well. They didn’t have to have  _ Mandalorian _ trainers at the base. There were plenty of non-Mandalorian bounty hunters he could find. If the Mandalorians thought they were too good for him and his son, Jango could do without them. All what he needed Boba to learn he could teach him himself anyways. 

Boba... Jango turned towards his quarters but found his feet carrying them past it. 

Kyramla sent him a sideways look. “You’re worried,” she said in the low voice they used on stealth missions. 

“What if they did something,” he muttered back, “to the clones,” he gritted his teeth, “to  _ Boba _ .”

She flashed him her teeth. “Then we find out.”

Sneaking past the Kaminoans was easy—Jango had done it from the very first day—but slicing into their most secret files was more difficult. Eventually he had to use one of his expensive slicing code cylinders, bought at a steep price from one of the galaxy’s best criminal slicers. But once he’d reached the master files for the clones he’d had to download them to his personal data pad to prevent getting caught by a cloner walking by.

It was back at his quarters, after Boba had been put to bed, that he read the files. 

“Demagolkas,” he hissed out. The cloners  _ had _ done something with the dæmons, but luckily there were no notes on Boba. He couldn’t parse the thick chemistries of it, but it was clear they’d tried  _ something _ to change the dæmons. Whether or not it worked like they wanted, he didn’t know.

“What?” Kyramla sat next to him on the sofa, leaning her head in. “What’s that?” she asked, tapping the screen with her nose at another file. She hissed her own curse when the file, on a datapad created by the Kaminoans and not meant for animal textures, didn’t open.

Obligingly, Jango tapped the file to open.

There was silence as they read it.

There was silence as he lowered the pad.

There was silence as they thought about it.

“They’re actually—” Kyramla started. She stopped.

“Yeah.”

“This is—” she stopped again. “ _ Ori’dush _ .”

He opened the pad again, reading down the list.

“No,” he said, sitting it down. “This is  _ skira _ .”

She whipped her head around to stare at him. He grinned at her, feeling for once like  _ he _ had the sharp, predatory teeth and launched himself to his feet to pace the room.

“They’re _ slaves _ ,” she said. “There’s no way they’ll rise up now.”

“They’re  _ droids _ ,” he said, his heart beating faster. “Don’t you see? The Jedi demanded their own slave army, and it’s their slave army that will kill them in the end.”

His adrenaline was up, but his mind was reaching that calm calculating spot before he pulled the trigger. You didn’t create a list of orders like that and not plan on using it. 

“They’re not droids,” Kyramla scolded, but he could hear her wavering, just a little. She had been the one in a tiny cage fit for a puppy during their enslavement. Put there by the Jedi.

“You read the first file.” With the ‘behavior’ modifications, and the training, they were basically droids. He glanced down the hallway. “They’re nothing like Boba.”

Boba. His son was flawless on a level that the Kaminoans couldn’t comprehend. But now he couldn’t be allowed to have contact with the weaker, flawed clones. 

“What do we do?” 

Silence.

Jango locked eyes with his dæmon. He leant forward and deleted everything from the data pad. 

“We do nothing. We tell no one. And when the Jedi comes in a few years to collect their army, we look right into his eyes,” he said, teeth flashing again, “and  _ smile _ .”

**Author's Note:**

> Mando’a translation:  
> Ner: Mine, my  
> Kyramla: fatal/deadly  
> Skira: personal revenge (different from justice/vengeance)  
> Cuy’val Dar: lit. the ones that don’t exist, trainers hired by Jango  
> verd’goten: trials of adulthood (taken at age 13)  
> ade: children  
> dul’runi: half-soul (invented by me!!!!)  
> Demagolka: someone who commits atrocities, a real-life monster, a war criminal - from the notorious Mandalorian scientist of the Old Republic, Demagol, known for his experiments on children, and a figure of hate and dread in the Mando psyche  
> Ori’dush: evil


End file.
